Vignettes: A City of Many Faces
by Kaelir of Lorien
Summary: There is more than one lens through which to view a man's soul. A series of second-person studies looking into the hearts and minds of the characters of Sherlock.
1. The Puppeteer

**Author's Note: **I had the urge to write something short and less plot-based than "His Brother's Keeper", and so I present to you now a series of short vignettes centered around the characters of _Sherlock_.

(I leave it to you to figure out who is who. It shouldn't be terribly difficult.)

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**The Puppeteer**

You don't remember the first time someone looked at you in fear, nor the first moment when you tasted power and found in it the flavour of a thousand lifetimes all swirling together under your smooth and silver tongue. You do recall a slow, patient process, a climb on the social ladder that for all its gilt finish is still only made of wood and clay. A fragile structure, at best, and yet your life depends on it, and death has long since ceased to be the ultimate enemy.

You have watched the missteps of nations – in worry, in sorrow, in triumph – and your smile has grown cold and cynical with the passing of many dark days and sleepless nights. There is something to be said for this world, after all, and you say it, to many names and to many faces, and you somehow derive a low, drawn-in breath of pleasure in watching the strings play out from your long and subtle fingertips.

His music is loud, but yours is silent; the whispered melody of code and coin and tightly-closed doors, from behind which only a few carefully misplaced phrases escape.

They scurry away, and you smile, and you wait.

Your eyes are cold; a steely grey that mirrors a low cloudcover and an adamant pen. You know precisely the measure of control it takes to make those eyes widen in feigned surprise, flash with sudden anger, narrow with the calculation of delicately-implied threat. To be a master of others, a man must first be master of himself, and you have discipline in quantities that cause braver souls than you to wither slowly away in the face of it.

It is hard to imagine, then, that you doubt yourself.

But you do. Your fears are great and very, very real, and in some dark recess of your thoughts that sees never the light of day, but only the utter silence of a black and hopeless night, somewhere in a place you yourself have placed out of reach, you are confronted with a terror that you hope you will never know. Consequences are the stuff of nightmares, and mistakes the ghosts that drift, hollow and loathsome, in front of your vision when that near-perfect mask of self-control edges out of place.

You are aloof, pragmatic, wise in the ways of the world that you can see, at times, to be falling to pieces all around you, and so you know that failure at some point becomes inevitable. Perfection is naive, and yet, still, beyond all reason, you are afraid.

Afraid because your heart is still there, beating a steady rhythm that is as much in your head as it is in your chest, and you often wish you could have rid yourself of it long ago for fear that one day it will compromise you when it matters most.

And your greatest fear, you know, is that it won't.

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**Hope you enjoyed this first one! Reviews are loved more than chocolate and almost as much as leek and potato soup. :)**


	2. The Martyr

**The Martyr**

You've seen a lot more than people give you credit for, sometimes. Other times, you wonder when enough will be enough. You ask yourself how long you'll be able to do this, when you never know the terrible things each day could bring, when you know that, somehow, somewhere, someone is hurting and you can't always be the one who lends that hand or that shoulder, and when you know, beyond all else, that there is nothing else in the world you would rather be doing.

You could never sit back and watch the world pass by. You could never imagine taking a back seat, being passive and at peace.

Peace is a thing of the ideal world, the world you're working for, and even though you know that every step is a heavy, uphill tread and it is terribly unlikely that you or anyone else will ever reach that peak, you keep trying. You fight.

And if you can't go home at the end of the day telling yourself that you've done everything humanly possible with the resources you have and the people you have clustered around you, sleep is only a veil, and you toss and turn and wonder why, why you couldn't have tried just a bit harder, moved just a bit faster, made that one decision and turned right instead of left because it just might have made that one crucial difference not only in your life but in the lives of everyone you meant to make the decision for in the first place.

You know what all this feels like, and because of that, you wonder how in all hell he's managed to get himself a friend. He has far less of a heart than you do, so little of one that it's incredible to imagine that he may just have looked deeper and discovered that it was, in fact, still there, beating slowly and steadily and just waiting for something he doesn't even know exists. Except maybe he does now. Maybe your words are more than just a restless wish tossed off in the flustered heat of annoyance and resignation.

You know that a kind word, even a smile, is too much to expect, and so you never expect it anymore. You don't question things when you don't have to, and that has become your policy to live by, and there are still times when you ask yourself what you're sacrificing, and whether it might be the whole of yourself.

You hate to think that, one day, you will wake up and realise that in your dedication and your desperation, you have become the one you've pitied for so long.

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**Please do let me know what you think! I'm sure you know who this one is. :)**


	3. The Deceiver

**The Deceiver**

For over thirty years you've watched the people of this world pass by. For over thirty years you've listened to their pleas, their dreams, their desperations, and yet you above anyone else in this world have lived a hundred lifetimes in your quiet way and found in them all a distinct lack of—_something_.

You've made it your life's work to discover what something is.

Or perhaps you know it already, and what annoys you the most is that, in the end, there's nothing you can do about it. You constantly seek higher, further, taking risks as they come and then twisting them within your cold fingertips to meld them into something else entirely, something that is no longer just _risk_ but a chance far closer to a suicide mission where the odds are all piled against you and you smile because you know how much is at stake—and you take the plunge anyway. If you end up dead at the end, well, maybe that just means you weren't good enough, and by that reasoning you probably deserve it.

You're lucky, then, that all this doesn't bother you. Because you're not like other people. For you, life isn't about living. It's about the sudden stop at the end, the point of climax that isn't really a climax but a happening no more significant than the snuffing out of a single candleflame. It doesn't mean anything. Not really. And still, in some strange, obscure way, you find yourself defined by this one simple, solid fact.

They always remind you that, after you school, life isn't a game. It's real life, they tell you, and everything has consequences, and everything matters, and you smile to yourself and shake your head ever so slightly at how wrong they all are. _Nothing_ matters, and you take that, and run with it, and in the vast, intricate labyrinth that is your mind you sweep the entire world onto a playing field and claim the darkest roads as your own. A board, a battleground—they are one and the same. You gather your pawns as the years trickle monotonously onward, and the only pleasure you derive is from playing them up against each other and watching the pieces of the aftermath scatter to the four corners of the earth; and the best part is, there are only a few who realise they're playing for an audience.

And then _he_ comes along. That one. That tall, terribly intriguing one with the darkness buried inside of him somewhere. You know it's there—you can always tell. But he's hidden it, and this in itself makes you pause for a moment in contemplation. You've been watching him for a long time now, too long, and you know that if you don't make a move soon, the curiosity is going to destroy you from the inside out. Curiosity, and boredom; they are the two worst feelings in the world, and your intimate companions over the long, tedious years.

You wonder if, this time, he will prove himself equal to you. It would be a terribly strange thing if, after all this time, you finally fell. You wonder what it feels like. And then, because there's nothing else remaining, then that's when you decide you'd like to find out.

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_Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Do a leave some, if you've a mind! :) Thank ye kindly for reading!_


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